Flexible Movement Foundation
Your body is a lot like a car, and until we develop brain transferring technology it is your defacto daily driver. Your heart and vascular system is the fuel tank of the car, providing energy. Your muscles the engine. Your lungs the carburetor or fuel injection system.
Each system is critical to make the car get you from point A to point B.
If you had to pick one, would you rather have a car with the best engine, the best fuel system, or the best handling and suspension?
I would guess most gear heads would go for the first option and get the biggest engine for burning out on the track. I would like to argue that the steering and suspension is highly underrated not only in the car world but with our bodies as well.
People get engines they want more and more horse power. They want the best fuel and have enough to get them where they need. We don’t think about flexibility enough. Unless your drag racing a car that can’t turn won’t be that useful, but many of us are in that situation!
It’s an ability we have and don’t appreciate until we don’t have it anymore. I’m personally working on this by sitting less, squatting more, and doing daily flexibility workouts.
Once a foundation of flexibility is established and maintained you can focus on supercharging your engine and adding nitro boosters.
Doing Flexibility Workouts with iOS Shortcuts
I’m a big fan of Peter Attia and created an iPhone Shortcut app that has Siri talk you through the workout and prompting you when your time is up! It also logs your flexibility workout to the Health app.
You can even set a home screen button for quick access to the workout so no more excuses. For ultimate accountability you can create a Shortcut Automation to prompt you to perform the workouts at at set time or location.
There are three workouts and shortcuts. I recommend watching the YouTube videos a few times to get a feel for the movements and then use the Shortcuts to prompt and guide you through the workouts. Very useful at the gym. I’ve personally seen dramatic improvements from following these simple and quick workouts. I hope they are useful to others.
Below are the iCloud links to download the shortcuts and links to the original YouTube videos.
- Soft Tissue Preparation - Requires a foam roller and lacrosse ball
- Muscle Activation
- Dynamic Prepartaion
You will have to enable untrusted shortcuts to import this. You can do this in Settings->Shortcuts->Enable Untrusted Settings. If you’ve never used the Shortcuts app before you will need to run at least a single shortcut before this setting will appear. Apple protecting you from yourself I guess.